Startup Next is the world’s #1 pre-acceleration program for startups. Backed by Techstars and Google for Entrepreneurs, it helps startups prepare for an accelerator or investment, gives participants access to the high-impact mentorship, best practice tools and resources, plus the opportunity to gain access to capital.

At The Working Group on Friday night a fresh cohort of startups graduated from the Toronto edition of the global program. Two startups will be going on to present at Startup Next’s global demo day in San Francisco: Moodi and Thimble.

Moodi (www.getmoodi.com) is an emotion-based application that allows you to share, track and get feedback about your emotions, safely and anonymously with the ability to gain access to professional support.

For healthcare professionals, therapists, and educators responsible for the emotional well-being of others, Moodi provides a subscription-based platform offering group-based analytics, alerts, engagement features, and moderation tools to enable them to improve and track the emotional health of their end users over time.

Thimble (http://www.gradfly.co/) is a “crowd-instructing” repository for hardware/software projects like Github is for code. Formerly Gradfly, Thimble is a place for community members to showcase what they build, collaborate and build their portfolio.

In 2014 Startup Next helped more than 20 startups around the world get into top accelerators, including Techstars and 500 Startups, and helped eight more raise a collective $6.7 million in seed funding. In the Spring of 2014 Toronto’s inaugural cohort launched Sampler, who went on to raise an impressive $645,000 to build their social sampling platform.

Startup Next is an initiative of UP Global, the non-profit organization behind Startup Weekend and Startup Digest, and its backed by Techstars, Google for Entrepreneurs and Global Accelerator Network. The program is organized and supported locally by The Working Group (TWG) and MaRs.

A huge “thank you” to all of the mentors who helped make this program such a huge success. And congratulations to all of the participating teams. If you’d like to find out more about this program and the participating startups please contact holly@twg.ca.

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